A country of middlemen
Jack Baruth
Near the end of 2004’s English gangster film Layer Cake, Michael Gambon takes the protagonist aside and solemnly intones, “The art of good business is being a good middleman.” This was very much on my mind when I discovered that my latest vacation rental, in addition to being booked and paid through Airbnb, would be administered through a company called Staywell, which sent two model/actress types out in a brand-new Mercedes SUV to wait patiently while I negotiated Los Angeles traffic. When I arrived a full hour later than planned, they still insisted on showing me the rental from top to bottom. “This…is a bathroom.” Well, if you say so.
In the week leading up to the rental, I’d been carpet-bombed by auto-generated emails from both Airbnb and Staywell. Often the emails and the demands enclosed within were essentially identical, meaning that I was performing the same tasks — photographing my ID, providing details of my fellow guests — for two mostly ethereal corporations. While I have no doubt that Staywell is both profitable and useful to the property owners who use it to serve as an intermediary between them and Airbnb, I’m not sure what I got out of the deal other than an upcharge considerable enough to have two people in a $90,000 car show me what a bathroom looks like.
This Russian doll nesting of parasitical internet companies is not limited to vacation rentals, of course. Very few online retailers do their own payment processing anymore. I am old enough to recall when most of them did because I was alive in 2018. No sooner did I get used to that, however, and the slightly disturbing evidence of data sharing that accompanies a visit to a previously unknown company that seems to already know your shipping address, credit card details, and date of birth, then a new breed of middlemen started showing up on websites.
For a nontrivial charge over and above what you’ve just agreed to pay your favorite vendor of clothing or pens or books, Route will protect your package and guarantee delivery. Otherwise, the clear implication is, you’re on your own in the brutal cyberpunk future of 2023 in which your cherished and possibly life-impacting purchase could be stolen off a train in California or thrown away in a dumpster because the “private contract driver” hired by FedEx or UPS doesn’t feel up to the challenge of carrying it all the way to your front door.
The method by which Route “protects” a package is unclear. I’d pay real money to have my next box of English ties or USA-made razor blades accompanied at all times by a four-legged murder drone like the ones in Black Mirror, just for the impression it would make on the neighbors, but I suspect that in the end, you’re just buying insurance over and above that offered by the carriers. Nothing is being protected, and the “call tree” to get real service after the fact will likely be of sequoia proportions.
Not interested in Route? Perhaps you’d like to try re:do, which offers “unlimited return for refunds or exchanges” for an additional charge that appears to be around 8% of your original purchase. The re:do corporate site offers retailers the chance to “make money from free returns, for free.” But it’s not “free” to the customer, who was once king of the American business landscape but is now an annoying and slightly embarrassing hiccup in the otherwise seamless corporate translation of government subsidies to social justice initiatives. “Transform your returns center into a profit center in one easy click, with no coding required through the Shopify App Store,” the company site bleats.
Choosing both Route and re:do on top of the usual payment processing from Shop Pay or PayPal probably adds between 9% and 15% to the true transaction price. Here’s the magic of this unholy trinity: There are very few people involved. It’s simply a Hot Wheels model, relatively speaking, of this country’s Gomorran slouch toward financialization as a sole business model. Once upon a time, products were manufactured in the United States. Then they were merely marketed and sold in the United States. Now all of that has been outsourced to an app developed in South Asian coding sweatshops, and the smart money is on financializing the resultant transactions through “protection” and “free returns.”
The worst part, of course, is that this inverted pyramid is resting on an increasingly unsteady and crumbling base of real-world service. About two years ago, my son talked me into ordering some hamburgers on an app from “MrBeast,” a popular YouTube personality. Of course, the resulting burgers were made in the back kitchen of an existing restaurant by people who, if my conversations after the fact are any indication, were both utterly unprepared for the online onslaught and absolutely unwilling to repeat the experience under any circumstances.
You’ll read that “nobody wants to work in restaurants right now.” This is partially a code phrase for “we can’t get the labor we want at the price we want” and also a reflection of the fact that people don’t want to make food all night for a “virtual brand,” of which MrBeast Burgers is far from the sole example. The online customers are paying more because the “virtual brand” has to get paid on top of the regular price, so they expect more — but it’s harder to deliver to those standards when your kitchen is already overwhelmed. So people don’t tip, which means that employees quit, which means that the remaining staff is even worse off.
Each of these parasitical online entities employs the Right Kind Of People: young, coastal, on highly skilled worker visas, spending all their money on luxury apartment rentals and Instagram-worthy food. The ones doing their services, by contrast, are often the Wrong Kind Of People: aging, poor, insufficiently sensitive to proper pronoun usage and/or the threats against our democracy from other people who look and think exactly like they do. Why not erect a towering mirror-glass edifice of additional profit on top of your already long-suffering UPS driver rotation or back-of-house kitchen staff?
The irony of Gambon’s advice in Layer Cake is this: Gambon is playing a casually murderous and depraved criminal. It’s the mission statement of a morally vacant entity where the only “value add” is the further dilution of deadly street drugs. As with 1984, Brave New World, and countless other tales of future or current dystopia, Layer Cake is meant to shock — but as is also the case with each of the other aforementioned sources, someone decided to go out and take the worldview literally. So if you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine an underemployed model showing you how a bathroom works while you wait on hold with the company that “protected” a missing package on your behalf and some miserable fellow toils on a hundred-burger backlog that will eventually come to include your dinner…forever. After a few years of that, you will positively yearn for the boot-on-the-face treatment promised by O’Brien in 1984. The bad news: You’ll probably still have to pay a processing fee for the privilege.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.